Blogs

IUPUI ScholarWorks is an institutional repository. It's also a website ... which means that people come looking for our site with keyword searches, direct links, social media sharing and all the other awesome sauce that makes the Internet a busy place.

Open access benefits scholars everywhere by connecting them to research they may not otherwise be able to access, but I'd like to take a moment to look at open access in reverse. By making my research open access, I benefit myself as well as the community at large. My work gets much wider exposure through my deposits in IUPUI ScholarWorks than it would ever receive confined to a single journal or conference. My 2012 article, “Opening Interlibrary Loan to Open Access,” has 415 file views from countries as diverse as the US, China, Italy, Ukraine, and Australia. The 2011 conference presentation on which it was based has 177 file views from an equally diverse set of countries. An earlier article, “Going Global: An International Survey of Lending and Borrowing across Borders,” has 156 file views.

The impact is even more apparent when you look at conference presentations.

Lately, I have been spending more time playing around with R. As an R beginner and someone interested in data visualization, one of my favorite packages so far is ggplot2. This package vastly simplifies the process of plotting data and the results are rather aesthetically pleasing. One of the really powerful features of ggplot2 is the way in which it makes visually encoding multiple dimensions of a dataset much easier.

In this brief tutorial, I will plot some data generated using Excel. The data (available here) represent 150 individuals and contains information on their gender, income, time spent commuting to work, student loans, and education level. I fabricated the data so that patterns will emerge in the resulting visualization that mimic what you might expect to see in the real world, but the data are totally fake.

The following presupposes some basic familiarity with R. If you are brand new, you may want to start with a basic R tutorial – there are dozens freely available on the internet.

Last month Kathleen Fitzpatrick announced the launch of a new open access repository for the humanities, CORE. I love repositories and I love open access; so, I'm happy to see it. As a new repository, CORE has the advantage of an existing collection of users, members of MLA Commons--an academic social network that hopes to grow into a larger network for the humanities. MLA Commons/CORE is not the first academic social network to enter the repository space, but it's the right direction for repository development. Even so, it's a reactionary development and it's about a decade too late.

There is presently a Faculty Leaning Community developing a working definition of Public Scholarship for IUPUI. Despite someone else telling me I regularly participated in public scholarship, I had a hard time suggesting a complete definition. My first inclination was, “it’s scholarship about civic engagement,” and while that can be public scholarship it’s not the most powerful version.

The Faculty Learning Community’s current working definition:

IUPUI defines public scholarship as an intellectually and methodologically rigorous and trustworthy endeavor that is responsive to public audiences. It is scholarly work that advances one or more academic disciplines by emphasizing co-production of knowledge with community stakeholders. Contrasted with one-way applications of faculty expertise to community problems, public scholarship frames and addresses issues in ways that result in meaningful public application, or transformation, and promotes community-engaged methods of discovery and dissemination of gained knowledge.

Over the past few months, I have been delving into the literature on research ethics, scientific integrity, the responsible conduct of research, whatever your preferred term may be. The fact is that there isn't much clarity in the research on how research is conducted, prioritized, funded, disseminated, and evaluated. Much of my work in providing data services comes back to this notion of data integrity and the integrity of the scholarly record. While I am no philosophy of science or history of science expert, I find this discussion fascinating. The conversation about how politics and culture shape research is one that every undergraduate and graduate student doing research in higher education institutions should be exposed to.

IUPUI students, staff and faculty submitted 1,595 items to IUPUI ScholarWorks during the 2014-2015 academic year. Not bad. We're excited to see the repository grow. I suspect that we'll surpass 6,000 items before the month of September ends.

During that year we also saw a 25% increase in unique visits and a 12% increase in page views--in fact, April 2015 was our busiest month of all time: 26, 880 page views.

We have a short list of "old stand bys" that drive a large portion of our web traffic, but (from time to time) I also like to look at recent submissions to see what's hot. These are new works that are attracting a lot of recent web traffic--while that's no guarantee that people will continue to search for these items, someone is looking for them now and we're glad that IUPUI ScholarWorks can make them discoverable.

Here's the list of the current top ten most viewed items submitted in the 2014-2015 academic year:

To apply for the scholarship, please send a 1-2 page letter of application to iahi@iupui.edu by May 22. In the letter, clearly outline how attendance at the HILT Institute will assist you in your current or future research or professional development in the arts or humanities. Please attach a 2-page CV to the email.

All full-time tenured and tenure-eligible faculty from all schools and units at IUPUI are eligible to apply. Under certain circumstances, non-tenure-track faculty members whose evaluation criteria include research or creative activity may also be eligible with an explanation in a letter of support from their chair or dean.

I use Zotero a lot, but not as much as some. For those of you out there who find your 300 MB of free file storage dwindling, connecting Zotero to a cloud storage service via its file sync feature is a great way to avoid paying Zotero for additional storage. The solution detailed in this post uses Box. If you don’t have an account with Box through your institution, then you can sign up for a personal account, which provides 10 GB of file storage.

Once you have set up your account with Box, you will need to install Box Sync on your machine. Login to your Box account. Click on your profile name in the upper right hand corner and select Get Box Sync:

As Sunshine Week comes to a close, I cannot help but think about the similarities between open access to scholarly information and the push for increased transparency in our government. I am certainly not the first person to draw parallels between the two, but the conversion usually focuses on public access plans for federally-funded research, such as those required by the NSF and the NIH. The similarities I see run deeper than funding agency mandates.

For those unfamiliar with Sunshine Week, it is a non-partisan effort that seeks to improve the lives of individuals and strengthen communities through increasing access to government information. This is a goal that I am sure many of us in academia find laudable, but what about access to our own scholarship? Surely people stand to benefit from access to this scholarship in many of the same ways that they benefit from open access to government information.